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When I was a kid I really wanted to see an MMORPG that combined all the different Battle Network gimmicks and let you make your own non-Megaman Navi. It was called Megaman Battle Network Omega, in my mind, and I had lots of ideas for what it should look like.
Anyway, yeah, from an adult perspective, it's very very obvious that the ingame society needs to stop putting everything online. Oddly prophetic.
The MegaMan Battle Network games offered an early glimpse into the dystopian horror that is the Internet of Things.
I'm watching master play it right now and he just connected into a girl's "smart" piano and there was malware in there.
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Another red flag is a weird disinterest in verifying specific facts.
"They" are conspiring to ruin everything. I'm not sure exactly who "they" are, what they're doing, or how, but I know they're evil and responsible for all the major woes of the world.
A real conspiracy is a very specific thing. Specific people take specific actions to accomplish specific goals. If you suspect one, you check those specific claims.
A conspiracy theory is usually very nebulous. Specific claims might be made, but aren't important; if a prediction fails or a claim is disproven, the theorists barely care.
It's a form of doublethink, I suspect. On some level they know it's not exactly true, so they don't treat the facts like real facts. But they also don't think it's exactly false; it's like all the seemingly specific claims are just metaphors for some deeper "truth".
If I came to believe the Earth was flat, I'd want to see the edge. I think most people would. It would be the greatest imaginable tourist destination. But flat Earthers don't think of it that way; the edge of the world doesn't occupy the same mental space as a straightforwardly real place.
The Conspiratorial Mindset
So, I've always had a bit of an interest in scams and hokum, and what people call "Cults".
One of the common refrains when you talk about religious Cults is, "If you think about it all religions have beliefs that seem odd to outsiders" and this is true, but as I read more about cults I started to think,
"Wait, a lot of these groups aren't united just by having unusual religious or supernatural views; a lot of them also seem to have matching patterns of behaviors that have nothing to do with belief in psychic space aliens"
I'm talking about things like,
Having a leadership structure which is absolute, where the top leaders cannot be disciplined or even openly criticized by lower members;
Exerting tremendous control over the dress and behavior of adherents;
Telling adherents that outsiders are untrustworthy and that contact with outsiders should be strictly limited and heavily monitored by organizational leadership;
The extensive and common use of shunning and reprogramming in response to violation of any of the above rules.
In some groups, failing to adhere to the dress code and spending a lot of time with outsiders is, at worst, the subject of a few little jabs at family gatherings. In other groups, those same behaviors are treated as Defcon one crises and become the central issue of the adherent's relationship with everybody else in the organization until they can be bullied back into doing the organization's bidding.
It was gratifying to learn that other people have noticed these patterns (Some people prefer the term "High Control Group" to "Cult" because it highlights what the actual problem is)
I am starting to notice similar dynamics in what are commonly called "Conspiracy theories".
The thing about conspiracy theories is... Well, conspiracies exist, and sometimes groups of powerful people get together to do something in secret which would get them in big trouble if they were to do it openly.
But I am starting to notice a particular, I don't know, a particular way of conceptualizing the organization and purpose of conspiracies which is unique to some people and which characterizes the kind of conspiracy theorist who takes Alex Jones seriously.
I kind of think of it as a "Witch-Hunting mentality".
For certain people in more primitive times and places, if they, say, slipped off a ladder and hurt themselves, their first thought would be, "That must have happened because a witch cursed me. We need to find and punish the witch who cursed me."
And this isn't just the attribution of malice that characterizes this idea:
One malicious conspiracy that might make you fall off a ladder is a manufacturer who doesn't care about safety ratings. Imagine that the manufacturer is really deliberately malicious here. A subordinate comes to him and says, "Our ladders can't reliably hold the weight of a person and a lot of them will probably break and cause people to fall and hurt themselves." and he says, "I know that but who cares, by the time people figure it out it'll be too late to get their money back."
That's a malicious conspiracy, but, importantly, if Bob buys a faulty ladder and falls off, the conspiracy wasn't trying to hurt Bob; it merely didn't care whether Bob got hurt.
Now, this distinction doesn't take away the malice and hostility towards Bob, but if you go to the ladder manufacturer and say, "Hey boss, Bob bought one of our faulty ladders, but he's really skinny so the ladder didn't break" the manufacturer will go, "Who the fuck is Bob? And good, that's one less angry person."
Whereas imagine Bob's ladder has been cursed to break by a witch. The witch did it because she hates Bob, and wants him to fall, and if she finds out he didn't fall, she'll go, "Curses, I'll have to find some other way to hurt Bob."
Conspiracy theorists, it seems to me, are far more inclined to conceptualize conspiracies as acts of deliberate malice aimed at them rather than acts of negligent malice.
@loving-n0t-heyting posted this article from the New York Post which contains a good example of what I mean:
“I thought I was on the cutting edge of promoting rights for gay people,” Yang said. “But then I started looking deeper into where this was coming from and who was paying for it, and I started to get very disillusioned...
I assume the people paying for it are LGBT advocacy groups? Did you, uh, not know that the people you were working for were paying you to work for them?
“When you really dig down you can see how much of this comes from documents and plans at the United Nations,” Yang said, referring in part to the UN’s “Gender Equality” initiative. “It’s part of a global agenda to restructure society, re-structure our social norms and the economy,” Yang claimed. “They are undermining the sexually dimorphic nature of reality and breaking down the differences between the sexes to break down our identity. They are constructing identities for us and they want us to adopt them.”
Oh, I see.
This is exactly what I mean. LGBT rights efforts make Yang and others feel disoriented, like society is being restructured and that they are being left behind, like they aren't quite in control of social norms and that stable identity categories can't be relied on anymore.
Now, one kind of conservative might look at that and say, "These are bad second order effects of LGBT people trying to assert their lifestyle in public and that's why we should oppose them."
But another kind says, "These changes make me feel unstable. Therefore, the main purpose of the changes is to make me feel unstable. In order to understand these changes, I need to figure out who wants me to feel unstable and what they would gain from making me feel unstable."
The idea that Yang's feeling of instability is simply a side effect of a series of efforts mainly focused on LGBT rights is incomprehensible. Instead, she believes that there is a series of efforts focused mainly on making her feel unstable, with LGBT rights as a kind of side effect to the main goal of making her feel unstable.
This kind of thing is, to me, a big red flag that indicates that we are starting to float away from reasonable conspiracy thinking into crazy town.
I am particularly curious if folks can recommend any writers or researchers who have noticed this dynamic.
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Japan's not an ethnostate. You can be a full citizen without being ethnically Japanese. Not common, obviously, but totally legal.
What makes an ethnostate isn't the homogeneity, it's the restriction of citizenship to the dominant ethnicity. It's about institutionalized bigotry on a grand scale.
I gotta say I still don't understand what you people mean by "Zionist" here on tumblr or in the broader world.
I guess my frustration is that the question of whether Israel was founded in a monstrous or unethical way does not seem to me to have any bearing on whether or not it can be dissolved as a country in 2025 or 2030 in a way that is safe for the citizens living there.
Honestly the current Netanyahu government seems to consist entirely of bloodthirsty monsters who should be removed from all power and left in a dark hole so that they can't hurt anybody anymore, so it seems like the anti-zionist position ought to be at its strongest but all I seem to find is a sort of glib conviction that the October 7th attacks proved that Israeli citizens should be happy to incorporate Hamas into a new Greater Palestinian government that accords Jewish citizens no particular status one way or another, and that anybody who is hesitant about this is just a racist of some sort.
Also there's a very bizarre conviction that the world's Jewish population can rely on the international refugee system if the shit goes down, and that's, uh, just ridiculous on the face of it.
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Trans people definitely are more kinky, and/or more open about their kinks.
But I don't think the difference is evenly distributed among fetishes. If I run into someone online being horny about feet or armpits or nurses, I generally expect them to be cis*. If I run into someone being horny about incest or furries or vore, I generally expect them to be trans. Obviously it's just a loose correlation - as I was saying in another thread, taste alone doesn't provide any deep insight into anyone - but I do think the correlation is real.
*because most people are cis. I don't have any reason to believe foot fetishes are underrepresented among trans people, but they don't seem to be overrepresented the way some kinks are.
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I don't care if you swear, man.
But the idea that you can somehow peer into someone's soul by analyzing their media consumption is on about the same level as handwriting analysis or phrenology. It's asinine.
Just look at the post you linked from 2016. Compare it to your current one. A decade ago, you were smarter and nicer.
I do find it increasingly uncomfortable how much of an expectation there is for adults, even childless adults, to be delighted by and engaged with media that is made for children. No adult needs to “broaden” their horizons by reading YA books. It’s is weird and shameful to read primarily children’s’ books if you are not a child! You deserve to be looked down upon for this! It’s weird for childless adults to watch Bluey, though I agree with my parenting friends that it’s excellent SEL content, which I will never watch because I am a fucking grown-up. The great privilege and joy of childlessness is being free from the dumb shit that innocent children love. It’s contemptible that adults deny themselves this privilege and it’s creepy that mass culture encourages this. Let’s celebrate the freedom of our barren wombs with some fucking Robert Caro and some bitter-tasting foods.
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Has anybody written anything about why certain fetishes are so heavily associated with trans-ness?
Incest is one example, obviously, but it's not the only kink that's vastly more common among trans people for no obvious reason.
I'm not looking for a transphobic screed here. I want actual analysis.
#I get why trans people are kinky in general#and why trans spaces are kink-friendly#but why these kinks specifically?
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Full knowledge isn't necessary for effective treatment, but more knowledge makes for more effective treatments. Since our knowledge is very limited, our treatments are very hit-and-miss.
My pet psychiatry theory is that, over the next hundred years, "autism" will be broken up into a whole bunch of largely-unrelated diagnoses. Because looking at the people we call autistic today, I really don't think it's a well-defined category.
The problem with psychiatry isn't that in principle there can be no such thing as a disease of the mind or a treatment for such a disease, it's that psychiatrists don't actually know how the mind works at any kind of fine mechanical level, the way a medical doctor roughly does with the body; where we know what a heart attack is no one knows what schizophrenia or bipolar disorder is. And no one has a good and consistent answer for where the line between mere idiosyncrasy or difference of viewpoint, preference, or behavior and mental pathology should be drawn. The problem with psychiatry in other words is that psychiatrists don't actually know very much, they are trying to treat you by letting blood to balance your humors and hoping it improves something. And it may, or it may not, or it may yield illusory improvements (as bloodletting sometimes did) while doing more damage than it is healing, or whatever else. Because psychiatrists are treating an organ (the brain) whose workings neither they nor anyone else actually understands.
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You know, over the years I've been on this website, I've seen a decent bit of you. And I have to say, you've gotten meaner over time. More judgmental. And more likely to cut loose over incredibly stupid shit.
Seriously, calling people "emotional cripples" or "retards" for their taste in fiction is ridiculous.
I do find it increasingly uncomfortable how much of an expectation there is for adults, even childless adults, to be delighted by and engaged with media that is made for children. No adult needs to “broaden” their horizons by reading YA books. It’s is weird and shameful to read primarily children’s’ books if you are not a child! You deserve to be looked down upon for this! It’s weird for childless adults to watch Bluey, though I agree with my parenting friends that it’s excellent SEL content, which I will never watch because I am a fucking grown-up. The great privilege and joy of childlessness is being free from the dumb shit that innocent children love. It’s contemptible that adults deny themselves this privilege and it’s creepy that mass culture encourages this. Let’s celebrate the freedom of our barren wombs with some fucking Robert Caro and some bitter-tasting foods.
#I've outgrown a lot of what I loved as a child#and I've learned that the classics generally deserve their status#but some of the kid stuff holds up beautifully
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Hang on, if you want a secular state that accords no special rights to either Muslims or Jews, what are we even arguing about?
That's also what I want, specifically because of how bad ethnostates are. Full citizenship for everyone, regardless of race, colour, or creed.
As I said before, I don't know what needs to be done next year or ten years from now. But we all know more or less what needs to be done this year. And I feel like that's a pretty good start.
The butchery needs to stop.
I gotta say I still don't understand what you people mean by "Zionist" here on tumblr or in the broader world.
I guess my frustration is that the question of whether Israel was founded in a monstrous or unethical way does not seem to me to have any bearing on whether or not it can be dissolved as a country in 2025 or 2030 in a way that is safe for the citizens living there.
Honestly the current Netanyahu government seems to consist entirely of bloodthirsty monsters who should be removed from all power and left in a dark hole so that they can't hurt anybody anymore, so it seems like the anti-zionist position ought to be at its strongest but all I seem to find is a sort of glib conviction that the October 7th attacks proved that Israeli citizens should be happy to incorporate Hamas into a new Greater Palestinian government that accords Jewish citizens no particular status one way or another, and that anybody who is hesitant about this is just a racist of some sort.
Also there's a very bizarre conviction that the world's Jewish population can rely on the international refugee system if the shit goes down, and that's, uh, just ridiculous on the face of it.
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In order to avoid the bad shit, they would've needed to want to. And ethnostates are shockingly efficient at finding people who love the bad shit and putting them in charge.
The organization that formed the core of the IDF was also the organization that bombed a ship full of Holocaust refugees in order to keep their blood on the right soil. The man who ordered that attack became the second Prime Minister of Israel, and his boss at the time of the attack became the first.
When you choose to create an ethnostate, that's the kind of moral poison you're injecting into your country. Better decisions would've required better people, and better people would've required a better set of founding principles.
If you ask me, the history of Israel is proof positive that trying to fight discrimination with discrimination is doomed and can never work. They had the best justification in history to found a nation upon reverse racism, and the result is an absolute horror show.
I gotta say I still don't understand what you people mean by "Zionist" here on tumblr or in the broader world.
I guess my frustration is that the question of whether Israel was founded in a monstrous or unethical way does not seem to me to have any bearing on whether or not it can be dissolved as a country in 2025 or 2030 in a way that is safe for the citizens living there.
Honestly the current Netanyahu government seems to consist entirely of bloodthirsty monsters who should be removed from all power and left in a dark hole so that they can't hurt anybody anymore, so it seems like the anti-zionist position ought to be at its strongest but all I seem to find is a sort of glib conviction that the October 7th attacks proved that Israeli citizens should be happy to incorporate Hamas into a new Greater Palestinian government that accords Jewish citizens no particular status one way or another, and that anybody who is hesitant about this is just a racist of some sort.
Also there's a very bizarre conviction that the world's Jewish population can rely on the international refugee system if the shit goes down, and that's, uh, just ridiculous on the face of it.
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Did you get a chance to ask her what she thinks gentrification is?
Apropos of stopping gentrification and opening a fiber arts commune instead: There is a block in my city in which almost all of the storefronts are owned by one person. When she first started expanding, she talked about how she had visited the city and saw a neighborhood in danger of gentrification... so she started snatching up properties and putting her businesses in them (an art gallery, a yarn store, a candle store, etc) to keep them from being purchased by out of town investors who would just open trendy businesses in them.
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Who's we?
Someone's always having this discussion somewhere. It never stops. But I don't recall talking to you about it.
And no, it won't stop even if Israel succeeds in ethnically cleansing Palestine completely. Some of the stuff I've heard about Greater Israel is flatly insane.
I gotta say I still don't understand what you people mean by "Zionist" here on tumblr or in the broader world.
I guess my frustration is that the question of whether Israel was founded in a monstrous or unethical way does not seem to me to have any bearing on whether or not it can be dissolved as a country in 2025 or 2030 in a way that is safe for the citizens living there.
Honestly the current Netanyahu government seems to consist entirely of bloodthirsty monsters who should be removed from all power and left in a dark hole so that they can't hurt anybody anymore, so it seems like the anti-zionist position ought to be at its strongest but all I seem to find is a sort of glib conviction that the October 7th attacks proved that Israeli citizens should be happy to incorporate Hamas into a new Greater Palestinian government that accords Jewish citizens no particular status one way or another, and that anybody who is hesitant about this is just a racist of some sort.
Also there's a very bizarre conviction that the world's Jewish population can rely on the international refugee system if the shit goes down, and that's, uh, just ridiculous on the face of it.
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Ethnostates are bad in large part because they always seem to lead to governments like Netanyahu's. They create immorality; they're bad for the soul.
After the Holocaust, it's easy to understand why people felt like the Jews needed their own country. It was an understandable mistake. But understandable or not, the consequences have been terrible. And they're only going to get worse until and unless things change.
These problems won't be fixed quickly, and I have no idea what needs to be done next year or ten years from now. But the first steps, the changes that need to be made immediately, seem pretty clear. And it sounds like you more or less agree with me on them.
Anyway, Zionist has different meanings in different mouths. I usually try to avoid using the word myself.
I gotta say I still don't understand what you people mean by "Zionist" here on tumblr or in the broader world.
I guess my frustration is that the question of whether Israel was founded in a monstrous or unethical way does not seem to me to have any bearing on whether or not it can be dissolved as a country in 2025 or 2030 in a way that is safe for the citizens living there.
Honestly the current Netanyahu government seems to consist entirely of bloodthirsty monsters who should be removed from all power and left in a dark hole so that they can't hurt anybody anymore, so it seems like the anti-zionist position ought to be at its strongest but all I seem to find is a sort of glib conviction that the October 7th attacks proved that Israeli citizens should be happy to incorporate Hamas into a new Greater Palestinian government that accords Jewish citizens no particular status one way or another, and that anybody who is hesitant about this is just a racist of some sort.
Also there's a very bizarre conviction that the world's Jewish population can rely on the international refugee system if the shit goes down, and that's, uh, just ridiculous on the face of it.
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The Stein votes make perfect sense to me, but the Trump votes seem insane. This is a guy who thinks that Joe Biden is "like a Palestinian". He doesn't just want to continue the slaughter; he wants to intensify it, to support it more strongly.
I guess there are low-information voters in every demographic, and the pro-Trump swing among Muslims doesn't look too big. But it's still wild.
Question for Liberals
You know, a friend of mine mention articles about how more Muslims voted for Trump then Harris in the 2024 election. The data I've seen is based off of exist polling. And yes, more Arab Americans voted for Trump than Harris. By one percentage point. Way more voted for Jill Stein. And my friend remembered how I ask Steve Shives if he will encourage Palestinian Americans to vote for Joe Biden (this was before he dropped from the race), and Steve said yes he would. "Is Trump any better?"
Well, it seemed to some Arab Americans, they rather vote third party, or even vote for Trump before they would reward the administration that was actively helping the Genocide in Gaza with their vote.
I am not sure if I want to share this fact with Steve Shives, yet. I will use other Liberals as a screen to test the waters.
So Liberals, how do you feel about the fact that more Arab Americans voted third party or Trump before voting for Harris?
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Paying the extortionate interest rate attached to a credit card ensures that you'll have less money to share, not more.
I don't know your situation and I don't want to make assumptions, but what you're saying here sounds crazy. You could easily be paying five thousand dollars a year on that 25K. Five thousand dollars that could be feeding you and your loved ones.
Have you looked into debt restructuring and/or bankruptcy?
Because the law, and the market, might be more generous than you realize. Making moneylenders compete for your payments can save you a lot of money, especially when you have an extra-bad type of debt like credit card debt. And bankruptcy isn't the irrevocable catastrophe that it's often made out to be.
Screw it
You know what, screw my credit card debt. I will forever have $25,000 in credit card debt. And never get rid of it. Because I will forever have friends that are in poverty. And in order for them to eat and live, someone has to give them money. And if I don't charge up my credit cards to the max, who will give them money? No seriously, who will give them money? Because even if all my friends and followers share the links for my friends or charitylinks.page, I am afraid that not many people will be able to give money to my friends in need. I don't blame them. Because all the workers are poor under Capitalism. That is the point of Capitalism. Have all the workers being poor to force them to work for the rich.
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For you as well?
Where I live, there's been a discussion for a few years of rising violence on one of the public transit systems. Usually, whenever anyone brings up feeling unsafe they're told to "go back to the suburbs" and that the threat is overblown.
Then a couple of trans women were attacked on that transit system and suddenly the same people are like "Everyone ignores violence against trans people!" which is largely true, but they were perfectly happy to downplay the same violence a week ago as long as it had (presumably) different targets.
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Why anime specifically?
My actual tip to trans guys trying to gain confidence in their identity is to pick your favorite anime guy role model and start being him. The same way little boys pretend to be spiderman when they're scared. Everything is scary when you're trans. You have to be a little boy for a bit.
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